And yet this language, with its echo of old usages and once-honored forms, delivers things a less quaint diction could hardly express. Explaining the ugly second-hand furniture he and Holly have in New York, Phillip writes, “It was not the kind of furniture either of us had grown up with, but we felt that the presence of such plain objects in our rooms was proof of our not having succumbed to the sentimental aesthetics of domesticity.” A beautiful fittingness develops whenever the father is the subject. “And what I must confirm is that this man, my father, this Mr. George Carver, did care more about clothes than any other man of his very masculine character and temperament that I have ever been acquainted with there in Memphis or here in Manhattan or in any other place at all.” Balked by his dim sight from finding an empty table in a nightclub, the old man “simply stood still and waited for events to develop in his favor.” His manner of posing and dressing, Phillip comes to see, was “his most direct means of communicating his aspirations and his actual vision of how things were with him.” A page of reminiscence about his father’s two cumbersome and cherished wardrobes culminates when, arriving at the Memphis airport and unexpectedly greeted by his elegantly clad progenitor, Phillip feels “as though someone had thrown open the double doors to one of those wardrobes of his and, figuratively speaking, I was inhaling the familiar aroma of his whole life and being. Only it wasn’t like an aroma exactly. For one moment it seemed I was about to be suffocated. For one moment it was as if I had never left Memphis.” Phillip’s virtually morbid interest in costume delivers, too, a telling and vivid portrait of his two sisters, who into their fifties dress with an embarrassing rakishness, partly as parody of the Memphis (as opposed to the sedater Nashville) style and partly in protest at having been denied marriage and “frozen forever in their roles as injured adolescents.” The father and sisters are old-fashioned characters, with costumes and settings and histories and psychologies; Phillip, by leaving the hinterland where clothes make a statement and the family “things” are worth inheriting, has become a non-character, a sensate shade dwelling in the low-affect regions of Don DeLillo and Donald Barthelme, a human being who assigns only a limited value, hedged about with irony, to himself. Some day, Phillip Carver fantasizes, he and Holly will simply fade away in their apartment—“when the sun shines in next morning there will be simply no trace of us.” The lovers will not have been “alive enough to have the strength to die.”
Peter Taylor’s ingrown, overdressed Tennessee world is bleaker than Henry James’s transatlantic empyrean, for it is a century more drained of the blood of the sacred. The sacred, Mircea Eliade has written, “implies the notions of being, of meaning, and of truth.… It is difficult to imagine how the human mind could function without the conviction that there is something irreducibly real in the world.” For James, the real constituted the human appetites, mostly for love and money, that flickered beneath and secretly shaped the heavily draped society of late-Victorian times. By Mr. Taylor’s time, appetite has shrivelled to dread—dread of another’s aroma, of being suffocated by one’s father’s appetites. For all the fussy good manners of his prose, the ugly war between parents and children has been his recurrent topic; one thinks of the short story “Porte Cochere” (the house in A Summons to Memphis has a porte cochere), which ends with that old father, in the darkness of his room, while his adult children noisily besiege his door, taking out the walking stick “with his father’s face carved on the head” and stumbling about “beating the upholstered chairs with the stick and calling the names of children under his breath.” In A Summons to Memphis, Phillip Carver wins through to a real, non-trivial insight when he accepts “Holly’s doctrine that our old people must be not merely forgiven all their injustices and unconscious cruelties in their roles as parents but that any selfishness on their parts had actually been required of them if they were to remain whole human beings and not become merely guardian robots of the young.” The wrongs of the father are inevitably visited upon the son and daughter, as part of the jostle of “whole human beings” sharing the earth. Beneath his talky, creaking courtesies, Peter Taylor deals bravely with the primal clauses of the social contract.
Back in Midland City
DEADEYE DICK, by Kurt Vonnegut. 240 pp. Delacorte, 1982.
The latest of Mr. Vonnegut’s bemused pilgrims is Rudolph Waltz, born in Midland City, Ohio, in 1932, and destined to fire, at the age of twelve, on random impulse, a bullet that strikes a pregnant woman right between the eyes while she is blamelessly running a vacuum cleaner eight blocks away. The young murderer thenceforth must bear the nickname of Deadeye Dick. He does not go to jail, being too young, but his father, a flamboyant would-be painter named Otto Waltz, does, and lawsuits by the dead woman’s family wipe out the Waltz fortune. Rudy waits on his helpless parents in lieu of servants, and eventually becomes a druggist and writes a play, Katmandu, which runs one disastrous night Off Broadway. And oh yes, while Rudy and his brother, a reformed methaqualone addict and former network president, are in Haiti a neutron bomb accidentally or on purpose wipes out all the people in Midland City but leaves the buildings and machinery nicely intact. These and many more curious circumstances are related in Vonnegut’s familiar and cherished voice of laconic ingenuousness. The moral outrage that lit up Slaughterhouse-Five and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater has dimmed to a fireside glow, and a kind of valentine to the small-city Midwest is delivered. The author has smuggled a fair amount of feeling into this cartoon of a humble life (Rudy never marries, and rarely complains); less intellectually festive than Slapstick, more persuasive than Jailbird, the tale has its odd beauty and a middling place in a unique oeuvre.
Last Blague
THE KING, by Donald Barthelme. 158 pp. Harper & Row, 1990.
This short novel was completed by the author three months before his death, and for all its farce it wears a melancholy tinge. King Arthur and the other figures of the Round Table legends have gotten mixed up with England’s last finest hour, the grim early phase of World War II. The book is written almost entirely in dialogue, and is concerned more with the sexual interplay between knights and ladies than with the inscrutable military action. Barthelme’s magical gift of deadpan incongruity seems muted here by a puzzled diffidence too deep to shake. “This is not my favorite among our wars,” Guinevere complains. “One has to think about so many different sorts of people one never thought about before .… Croats, for example. I never knew there was such a thing as a Croat before this war.” Similarly, King Arthur “can’t imagine what it would be like to be a churl. The country’s full of them, yet I have no idea how they think.” The Red Knight is a Communist, the Black Knight is an African, and the Grail is the atomic bomb:
“There’s a race on,” said the Blue Knight, “to find the Grail. The other side is hard at it, you may be sure. Myself, I’m partial to cobalt. It’s blue.”
Arthur renounces the Grail-bomb as immoral, and with his faithless but loyal Queen placidly waits the tragic end needed to make his name “resound in song and story.” Death is in the air: Launcelot has sat down with a reporter from the Times to settle the details of his obituary, and Arthur keeps wondering if he hasn’t lived too long. For all the eschatological gloom, there are some unrestrained Barthelme riffs of pure light-fingered nonsense: Lord Haw-Haw is made to say in one of his traitorous broadcasts, “Wake up, Englishmen! This war is not your war. If you believe you’ll win, you will also believe that featherbeds grow on trees and sneezing increases the size of the female bust.” A pacifist tract, a rueful travesty, a bumptious “feast of blague,” and a dazzlement of style both minimal and musical, The King has been elegantly produced, with fifteenth-century ornamental initials and nine of Barry Moser’s customarily superb wood engravings.
What You Deserve Is What You Get
YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS, by Joyce Carol Oates. 436 pp. Dutton, 1987.
Joyce Carol Oates, born in 1938, was perhaps born a hundred years too late; she needs a lustier audience, a race of Vict
orian word-eaters, to be worthy of her astounding productivity, her tireless gift of self-enthrallment. Not since Faulkner has an American writer seemed so mesmerized by a field of imaginary material, and so headstrong in the cultivation of that field. She has, I fear, rather overwhelmed the puny, mean-minded critical establishment of this country; after the first wave of stories and novels (most notably, A Garden of Earthly Delights and them) crashed in and swept away a debris of praise and prizes, protective seawalls were built, and a sullen tide set in. Many of the critics began to treat Miss Oates as one of her many scholar heroines, Marya Knauer, is treated by her eighth-grade school instructor, Mr. Schwilk:
Finally, Schwilk said airily, “You have a most feverish imagination,” and handed the story back; and that was that.
The author could have been offering a self-caricature when the hero of her third novel, Expensive People, wrote, “Now that I’m started, now that those ugly words are typed out, I could keep on typing forever. A kind of quiet, blubbering hysteria has set in.” Throughout the Seventies, the five-hundred-page novels piled up numbingly; Do With Me What You Will followed Wonderland and was followed by The Assassins, and in the Eighties, a trilogy of mammoth volumes in imitation of popular nineteenth-century genres—Bellefleur, A Bloodsmoor Romance, Mysteries of Winterthurn—blurred to near invisibility the line between Miss Oates and the scribblers of gothic romances. Her move, in the late Seventies, from an address in Windsor, Ontario, across from Detroit, to a position in Princeton also helped demythologize her; New York critics were in awe of anyone who could live near Detroit, but felt they owed nothing to a resident of bucolic New Jersey. Through these vicissitudes of repute, and some of the harshest scoldings ever administered to a serious talent, Miss Oates has continued to devote her energy to literature in almost all of its forms. Her short stories seem to be everywhere, from fledgling quarterlies to Esquire and Playboy. Her one-act plays have been produced Off Broadway. Her poems are being readied for a collected edition. Her criticism is generous and wide-ranging. With her husband, Raymond Smith, she edits the handsome Ontario Review and its line of books. Single-mindedness and efficiency rather than haste underlie her prolificacy; if the phrase “woman of letters” existed, she would be, foremost in this country, entitled to it.
As reader and critic I have been as overwhelmed as the next, and cannot offer to lay out for dissection the hydra-headed monster of Miss Oates’s oeuvre. But I can, and do, report that her latest novel, You Must Remember This, rallies all her strengths and is powerful—a storm of experience whose reality we cannot doubt, a fusion of fact and feeling, vision and circumstance which holds together, and holds us to it, through our terror and dismay. While some of her fiction appears to be built almost entirely out of projected anxieties, this book has a sentimental substance; its title (from, of course, the lyrics of “As Time Goes By,” of Casablanca fame) might be addressed by the author to herself. You Must Remember This is a historical novel of sorts, centered on the mid-Fifties, with traces of research in its passing references to Adlai Stevenson, Senator McCarthy, the Korean War, the Rosenberg executions, bomb shelters, and the popular songs and prizefights and automobiles of the time. Some of the glimpsed headlines seem a touch opportune, and some of the historical themes (such as that of bomb shelters) feel rubbed into the plot with a bit too much determination, but the background events of the period are by and large feelingly translated into subjective experience, by an author who was there. The advent of television, for instance, into the American home comes back with a rush:
Now the machine hummed nightly in the shadowy living room, its small screen glowed with an eerie atomic radiance, pale, bluish, ghostly, flickering. During the daytime Mrs. Stevick set up her ironing board so that she could watch whatever chanced to be on.… Her sister Ingrid came over once or twice a week to watch, Lizzie stayed home more often or met her boyfriends at other times, Mr. Stevick sat in his old leather chair, a magazine or a book open on his lap, yes he really was reading though he glanced up now and then to see what was going on, what sort of foolery the studio audiences were in an uproar about, there was Uncle Miltie simpering in a woman’s taffeta evening gown, staggering in spike-heeled shoes, there was Lucy fluttering her inch-long eyelashes at Desi, there was Phil Silvers in his army officer’s uniform smirking and leering, there was Ed Sullivan rubbing his hands together—like a funeral director, Mr. Stevick said.… Evenings that winter Enid did her homework with the door to her room ajar so she could hear the sound of the television downstairs.… Sometimes she looked up from her work, stricken with a curious kind of happiness. Hearing laughter downstairs—downstairs at 118 East Clinton! It was amazing. It was unprecedented. It would not have been possible without television.
The stale little Stevick household—father and mother and three daughters, Geraldine and Lizzie and Enid Maria—is the core of You Must Remember This, and its central action is the affair between Enid Maria and her half-uncle, Felix, a former prizefighter who is sixteen years older than she. The setting is one that has figured in Oates’s fiction from the start—a tough small upstate city, here called Port Oriskany and situated, like her native Lockport, on a canal. Her authority within this city, her ability to move through its schools and streets and stores and bars, evoking a social grid on which individual lives and dreams and passions bloom and quickly wilt, is grimly absolute. A shifty wheeler-dealer called Al Sansom, in bad trouble with both the IRS and his gangster colleagues, insists that Felix meet him at a tavern and then talks drunkenly about flying saucers:
Wide dark nostrils more prominent than usual, waxen sheen to the nose, a light coating of sweat on his forehead and Felix supposed he was tasting fear like scum in the mouth—Felix knew just how that tasted. He interrupted Al, saying abruptly, “Did you want us to get together to talk about that shit?” and while Al stared hurt he felt the impulse to laugh, adding, “or some other kind of shit?”
Al, with “the look … of a man in a rapidly falling elevator,” decides against confessing his soon-to-be-fatal troubles, and they step out onto the “snowy cindery” parking lot. “There was a hard stiff wind from the lake tasting of cold, of snow, an underlying chemical smell from somewhere close by.” The olfactory detail seems simple, but in the context of what has gone before—a ruined man groping for sympathy and getting none—the chemical whiff amid the snow and cold goes through us like a verdict of execution, and seems the breath of a majestically indifferent environment. Naturalism, the tradition that nurtures Miss Oates’s best instincts, always reports this indifference in our environments. What is compelling here (as in some of Jayne Ann Phillips’s work) is the avidity with which the characters’ spirits attempt to feed on this basically inedible stuff, making dreams of machines and canals and railroad bridges, or staggering with a pitiable softness (“As Al Sansom got drunker his skin got softer, pulpier, like whitish dough”) out into the cinders and snow and chemical smells.
Miss Oates knows her protoplasm. She sees our dark softness churn like flame. The novel begins with one of her ominous prologues, all in italics (her publishers, by the way, should find a better italic face for her; it is so much lighter than the Roman face that the words whisper when they mean to shout)—a string of one-sentence paragraphs describing fifteen-year-old Enid Maria Stevick happily attempting suicide by ingesting forty-seven aspirin tablets. In these days of frequently reported teen-age suicide, this fictional example, dated June 7, 1953, enlightens us; we are admitted to the seethe of passion, delusion, and calculation that rages behind the façade of a bright middle-class girl, and are shown how thin the membrane is between her erotic and her self-destructive compulsions. When she masturbates, it is felt as a flirtation with death: “How hard the heart could kick yet not burst: a muscle gone mad. Like the secret muscles between her legs frenzied and racing, contracting against her fingers. Each time Enid Maria thought she would die but she never died. There would be no end to it.” She flirts, too, on the trampoline at school, bouncing “high
and higher still, risking her neck,” so that the gym teacher rebukes her; and in the swimming pool, “a place where Death was possible,” diving and swimming underwater to exhaustion, so that afterwards “nothing could startle or hurt, for hours”; and by shoplifting downtown; and by losing herself in contemplation of her room’s intricately patterned wallpaper, “feeling her soul slip thinly from her into the wallpaper where there was no harm, never any danger”; and by being drawn to the steepsided canal that flows through Port Oriskany, and the narrow footbridge that crosses below the railroad trestle—“the footbridge was maybe five feet wide and shaky and if a train came by the noise was deafening, terrifying, the planks of the footbridge vibrated and it was natural to think the bridge would fall apart and you’d fall into the canal far below and drown.… The canal walls were thirty feet high just solid rock face and nothing to grab hold of except scrubby little trees that would break off in your hands. It had the look of a nightmare and Enid dreamed of it often.”